Dr Walt Wolfram

Named Distinguished Univ Professor

Biography

Walt Wolfram is William C. Friday Distinguished University Professor at North Carolina State University, where he also directs the North Carolina Language and Life Project. He has pioneered research on social and ethnic dialects since the 1960s and published more than 20 books and over 300 articles. Over the last two decades, he and his students have conducted more than 3,000 sociolinguistic interviews with residents of North Carolina and beyond, primarily under funding from the National Science Foundation. In addition to his research interests, Professor Wolfram is particularly interested in the application of sociolinguistic information to the public, including the production of a number of television documentaries, the construction of museum exhibits, and the development of an innovative formal and informal materials related to language diversity. He has received numerous awards, including the North Carolina Award (the highest award given to a citizen of North Carolina), Caldwell Humanities Laureate from the NC Humanities Council, the Holladay Medal at NC State, and the Linguistics, Language and the Public Award from the Linguistic Society of America. He has also served as President of the Linguistic Society of America, the American Dialect Society, and the Southeastern Conference on Linguistics.

Publications

Wolfram, Walt (with Mary Kohn, Jennifer Renn, Janneke Van Hofwegen, Charles Farrington). (forthcoming, in progress) The Longitudinal Development of African American English in the Early Lifespan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wolfram, Walt. (forthcoming) Public sociolinguistic education in the United States: A proactive, comprehensive program. In Robert Lawson and Dave Sayers (eds.) Sociolinguistic Research: Impact and Application. New York: Routledge

Kendall, Tyler, and Walt Wolfram (forthcoming). Engagement through data management and preservation: The North Carolina Language and Life Project and the Sociolinguistic Archive and Analysis Project. In Karen Corrigan and Adam Mearns (eds.), Creating and Digitizing Language Corpora, Volume 3: Databases for Public Engagement. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Wolfram, Walt and Caroline Myrick. Linguistic commonality in the English of the African Diaspora: Evidence from lesser-known varieties of English. In Cecelia Cutler, Vrzic Zvjezdana, and Phillip Angemeyer (eds.) Language Contact in Africa and the African Diaspora in the Americas. Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Wolfram, Walt. 2014. Vernacular dialects of English. In Marianna Di Paolo and Arthur K. Spears (eds.), Language and Dialects in the U.S. Focus on Diversity and Linguistics. New York: Routledge. 85-100.

Wolfram, Walt, Jaclyn Daugherty, and Danica Cullinan. 2014,On the (In)Significance of English language variation: Cherokee English and Lumbee English in comparative perspective. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 20.2 (Selected Papers from NWAV 42). Article 22:197-208.

____. 2013. The dynamic development of socioethnic varieties of English in North America. In Dani Schreier and Marianna Hundt (eds.), English as a Contact Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pp. 106-130.

Wolfram, Walt. 2011. The African American English canon in sociolinguistics. In Michael Adams and Anne Curzan (eds.), Contours of English and English Language Studies. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 34-52.